Bipartisanship We Can Believe In

Even if she didn't really mean it, I appreciate the gesture.


(Photo by Max Whittaker/Getty Images)

Habits Beat Deadlines

My friend Mark Mallman had an interesting post on his blog entitled "Deadlines." He is a master's degree student in sociology, and is having the normal graduate student trouble of getting down to the writing. He had tried to get his advisors to set deadlines for him, but it didn't really work. Both he and the advisors knew the deadlines weren't serious.

Instead, Mark has adopted the harder but more rewarding habit of a fellow student of setting aside a time each day -- 8 to 10 a.m., in his case -- to write. The rules are simple but firm:

She [the fellow student] does not allow herself to email, text, answer the phone, answer the door, eat, or play solitaire. She does not allow herself an out. The trick is, even if she only writes a hundred words in the two hours, it's writing only time.

Mark has adopted a similar rule, and it is already having good results. He is writing. I have a rule something like that: that is how I write a blog post each day. I have not been as strict about which distractions are excluded. When I get down to writing that book, though, I think these stricter rules will be necessary.

I suggested a similar rule to my undergraduates. They don't have a master's thesis to write, but they all have papers and quizzes, as well as notes and letters, that they should be writing at any time. They might not have two hours a day, but I think one hour a day is realistic for undergraduates.

In fact, I expect that nearly everyone reading these words has something that they are supposed to be writing all the time. Unless we are professional writers, we treat writing as a side job to be done only when we can no longer put it off. But our lives would be better, and our writing would be better, if we made a habit of absolutely setting aside time to write each day.

Because habits are more powerful than deadlines.

The Class War is Not So Simple at the Top

Robert Frank, in Richistan, reports that those with a net worth of $1 to $10 million tend to vote Republican in order to reduce their own taxes, while those worth more than $10 million tend to vote Democratic and give to liberal causes in order to “preserve the system of fairness and opportunities they had growing up.”

Likely Abortion Politics

I posted about abortion the other day in response to a friend's challenge. This led to an interesting further exchange, which I reproduce here.

I was glad to see you decided to respond to the Robbie George piece on Obama and abortion with a blog entry a few days ago. But I must tell you I was generally disappointed in the result, primarily because I thought you dodged the issue. It is true, of course, that George was extrapolating rather liberally from the FOCA language that you so helpfully provided. But that is the very point. As you well know, the left has famously supported an array of innocuous sounding policy statements, like the FOCA one, but then their lawyers argue from those statements for a regulatory regime and legal framework that goes far beyond what most people associate with the original position. Frankly, the FOCA position sounds roughly similar to our current abortion regime, which is what makes it seem harmless. But I can easily see NARAL and their ilk driving a Mack truck through the language to do exactly the sort of things George mentions in his piece. That was the issue you sidestepped by veering off into the argument about George’s piece being alarmist and rhetorically overblown. The piece may well have taken liberties, to be sure. But you provided no evidence (perhaps because no evidence exists) about what limitations on abortion Obama might actually find acceptable.

I don't know what limits Obama would put on abortion. Neither does Robbie George. Hillary Clinton has supported the 95-10 proposal. I expect that Obama would too if given a law to sign. It is clearly not one of his big issues either way.

Sure, there are people on the left who want to drive a truck though innocuous statutory language. Same thing on the right.

The truth is that there are not enough members of Congress who care enough about this issue, on either side, to force though a major abortion bill -- FOCA, anti-FOCA, or a serious compromise. FOCA will not be the first bill he signs, because there will not be a serious abortion bill in the next Congress, any more than there was in the last one (or dozen). And President Obama will not spend political capital to get one, any more than Pres. Bush did.

Well, now this is an EXCELLENT answer because you both acknowledge what seems to be true—that we will have to wait and see what Obama really thinks about abortion—and also provide a very politically grounded comment, that we’re just not in line for significant abortion legislation anytime soon.
Of course you’re correct that the right does the same kind of thing as the left on policy language—presumably that’s part of the ongoing struggle over the Defense of Marriage Act, for example. Seems to me this whole arena, of both sides trying to impose their views and policy approaches on the country via seemingly “safe” national legislation, would make a great conference topic for centrists who are trying to keep their sanity. I know an issue I’d love to see discussed in this vein involves “equal rights.” I’m certainly in favor of the notion of “equal pay for equal work,” for example. But I don’t have any clear sense of how this could be enforced without introducing so many skewed incentives that we’d end up worse off than we already are. Again, I’d like some centrist discussion of this rather than the usual bomb throwing from the political extremes.

To which I say, Amen.

All Taxes Redistribute Wealth -- That's What They Are For

There has been some very foolish talk on the campaign trail lately that one side is bad because they want to use taxes to redistribute wealth. This is silly -- all taxes redistribute wealth. They take from everyone to serve the common good. We all pay taxes so we can all have roads and schools and mail and security and thousands of other common goods. Some of our taxes go to individuals for their individual needs, such as school loans or medicare payments. Even the small fraction of Americans receiving straight-up welfare in order to take better care of their kids are serving the common good. The Earned Income Tax Credit is better than old-fashioned welfare because it only goes to people who are working, and only goes to working people who do not make quite enough to take care of their kids.

Rich people get back less money in services because they need them less, and poor people get more because they need them more. That is just. That improves the common good.

The Alternative to Arranged Marriage is Not Cohabitation

National Public Radio had an interesting series on arranged marriage among American Muslims. The main point was that even though American-raised, even American-born Muslims find themselves between American do-it-yourself mate selection and the arranged marriages of the Old Country, many American Muslims do find arranged marriages work out fine. Moreover, having your parents take an active role in mate selection takes out much of the anxiety of finding someone who is suitable without having to succumb utterly to American sexual norms.

Which leads me to what struck me most about this series. The final installment begins with this question to Shad Imam, who is now six years into his happy arranged marriage: "How do you marry someone you haven't lived with?" While cohabitation before marriage is common in the United States, and is the norm for college graduates, it is not really a good way to get to know a potential spouse. Cohabiters who marry have a higher divorce rate than people who do not live together before the wedding. The best-educated couples are starting to get this message, and their rate of pre-marital cohabitation is going down.

NPR is usually ahead of the curve on cultural trends. It is instructive to see that on this one they are still peddling the wisdom of a previous generation of mothers -- the antithesis of the moms who are arranging marriages -- to "give him a test drive first."

End Race and Sex Quotas in the Church

In my essay Rebuilding the Presbyterian Establishment, I call for ending the Committees on Representation that are mandatory at all levels of church government in the Presbyterian Church (USA). This point is secondary to my main point, which is that the whole church would be better off if we had an establishment of authoritative leaders to draw on. We used to, but we do not now in part because we deliberately dismantled the structures that create and recreate an establishment since the Sixties.

Still, one of the reasons that the "old boys' network" was dismantled was to create more opportunities for people who were not old white men to be in positions of leadership. Committees on Representation were mandated to monitor compliance with the cultural mandate, and shame the recalcitrant.

There may have been a moment when it was necessary to mandate the inclusion of women in leadership positions in the church, and to mandate the inclusion of racial-ethnic minorities and disabled people on the monitoring committees. I believe that, as that generation retires and is replaced by my naturally inclusive generations, that moment when the church required demographic quotas has passed. They are becoming counter-productive because they foster the idea that sex and ethnicity are primary identities within the church, rather than all being one in Christ.

Yesterday I met with the General Assembly Committee on Representation, the highest such body in the denomination. They were gracious, and we had a civil conversation. I thank them for the invitation. You will not be surprised to learn that the committed members of the Committee on Representation were not convinced that their body was no longer necessary. Fair enough. Several members of the committee also argued that overcoming white male privilege requires people who are not white males to always be in the conversation. I think the church does benefit when people who are not white males are in conversation. But that is a means to a higher end, not an end in itself.

We are faced now with the prudential judgment of whether we still need formal structures to push for demographic representation, or whether the Presbyterian Church is now normally against sex and race exclusion. I believe we have reached the time for change.

De-McDonaldizing the Family

My Introduction to Sociology class is working through George Ritzer's McDonaldization: The Reader. Ritzer has extended Max Weber's argument that rationalization is the master principle of modernity into current discussion through the example and metaphor of McDonald's and McDonaldization. In the Reader he includes are article by Sara Raley on the "de-McDonaldization of the family." She wrestles inconclusively with whether McDonaldization - efficiency, predictability, calculability, and control by non-human technology -- has significantly shaped the internal life of families today. Raley opens the essay, though, with the claim that the definition of family has changed significantly since the 1950s Donna Reed norm. Then, one predictable model of family was normative. Now, all kinds of organizations count as family.

I do not think the broadening of how we talk about family really represents "de-McDonaldization." The normative understanding of family life that was honored more in the 1950s -- of a married couple with their children -- was not the norm because it was the most efficient, predictable, calculable, nor technologically controlled. It was normative because most people wanted to achieve that kind of family. Raley adds the ideal of a breadwinner father and housewife mother. That part of the ideal has clearly changed, though not, I think, for de-McDonaldizing reasons.

The ideal of marrying for life and raising your kids together is still the ideal that most people have of family life. Fewer reach that norm than in the 1950s, but most people still do. And even those who do not reach that standard in their own lives still tend to hold it out as a dream. Some people, of course, do not uphold the nuclear family as the norm. But most still do.

If we no longer make as much of a cultural spectacle of the nuclear family as an ideal it is not because we have deMcDonaldized the definition of family. We haven't even changed our cultural ideal. We are just more polite about respecting other family types as well.

The Abortion Campaign: What's A Centrist to Think

Obama and McCain had a back-and-forth about abortion. A friend sent me Robert George's scathing attack on Obama as the most pro-abortion major candidate ever. Five minutes with pro-life and pro-choice websites will give you your daily quotient of hysteria - and despair.

My position on abortion, in case you need to know that before reading the rest, is that it should be safe, legal, and abhorent.

My argument today, though, is about how we tend to argue about abortion, and other controversial issues, especially in election campaigns. So let us look at a potentially important outcome of this election: the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA). Obama told Planned Parenthood that signing this act, assuming it passed Congress, would be the first thing he would do as president. Robbie George, a very smart guy and fellow Swarthmorean, says this act

would create a federally guaranteed ''fundamental right'' to abortion through all nine months of pregnancy, including ... a right to abort a fully developed child in the final weeks for undefined 'health' reasons. In essence, FOCA would abolish virtually every existing state and federal limitation on abortion, including parental consent and notification laws for minors, state and federal funding restrictions on abortion, and conscience protections for pro-life citizens working in the health-care industry-protections against being forced to participate in the practice of abortion or else lose their jobs.

So, what does FOCA actually say?

It is the policy of the United States that every woman has the fundamental right to choose to bear a child, to terminate a pregnancy prior to fetal viability, or to terminate a pregnancy after fetal viability when necessary to protect the life or health of the woman.

So how do you get from what the act says to all the things that George fears? The answer to this question could be repeated dozens of times in this polarized debate, and most others: Anything the other side does not explicitly prohibit, they must favor.

The point of this kind of argument is not to illuminate the truth. The point of this kind of argument is to create polarization. The point is to eliminate all middle positions. The point is to increase fear of the other side -- by reducing all arguments to Us and The Other Side.

In a free society, you can't prohibit polarizing and fear-mongering. What a centrist can do, though, is be skeptical of any argument that says if you do not prohibit every bad possibility, you must be for evil.

The Patriarchal Inherit By Default

I have previously reported Philip Longman's argument that the religious people will produce a growing part of future generations because they have many more kids than the secular do.

Longman also argues that families, and societies, with a patriarchal structure, will produce a growing part of future generations for the same reason: they have many more kids than the gender egalitarians do. In an article in Foreign Policy (March 2006) he argues that in all the industrialized nations, the families that emphasize paternal headship, investment, and service to the family produce larger families in this generation, which multiplies enormously in the next. Whereas family structure liberals average a little over one child per family, family structure conservatives are the overwhelming majority of the four-and-more-kid families. In France, for example, the early Gen-Xers who had three-plus kids have produced 50% of the younger generation.

With this kind of advantage in natural growth, Longman says we can anticipate continuing waves of conservative social movements and voting patterns, as the children of conservatives gain ground demographically in each generation.

Parsing Domestic Violence by Marriage and Class

This is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, so you may have seen a statistic like this: Nearly 25 percent of American women report being raped and/or physically assaulted by a current or former spouse, cohabiting partner, or date at some time in their lifetime.

This sort of statistic makes my students worry that they have a high likelihood of being beaten themselves. What this kind of scary blanket statistic obscures, though, is that educated, middle class, married people -- what the great majority of my students are likely to become -- are at the lowest risk of violence. As Waite and Gallagher note in The Case for Marriage, "the safest place for a women to be is inside marriage.” Being poor is an even greater risk factor than being unmarried: the National Family Violence Survey suggested that rates of "abusive violence" to women with annual incomes below $10,000 are more than 3.5 times those found in households with incomes over $40,000.

Domestic violence is a genuine problem for women and men of all marital states and social classes. But it is important in giving people a real sense of their own risks, and in fighting the culture of fear in general, to see that married middle class people are at low risk of domestic violence.

The Irrationality of Rationalization: California Marriage Licenses

We are talking about the "irrationalities of rationalization" in my Intro class. This is an idea derived from Max Weber's "iron cage," and developed most thoroughly by George Ritzer in his many works on McDonaldization. The idea is that as we transform every aspect of society to make it more efficient, calculable, predictable, and technologically controlled -- in a word, rationalized -- we also create unintended irrationalities.

A case in point comes from the news (as it always does when teaching Weber). California marriage licenses used to have a space for the name of the bride and the name of the groom. When the legal definition of marriage was expanded to cover same-sex couples, the state's bureaucrats followed the normal rules of bureaucratic rationalization: they changed the forms. They judged it more rational and efficient to have one form that could cover all cases -- both the traditional form that the vast majority of the form's users would want, and the rare exceptions. They opted for the most abstract, colorless, unromantic terms to use in place of "bride" and "groom." The new forms asked for Party A and Party B.

The "rational" solution to a problem of bureaucratic nomenclature, though, was an irrational reduction of marriage to many of the people who the state bureaucracy is supposed to serve, the taxpayers of California. Two of them, Rachael Bird and Gideon Codding, refused to use the new, abstract form when they got married, prefering to be bride and groom. The state refused to recognize their marriage. Law suits followed. Embarrassing publicity followed, pushing the bureaucrats to remember that rationalization is not supposed to be an end in itself, but to serve the people.

The state of California backed down. Bride and Groom are now back on the marriage license.

The Protestant Ethics Lives

I have been reading one of my favorite books, Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism with my Intro to Sociology students this week. They showed an interesting mix of two contradictory views in their own approach to work. On the one hand, they mouth fashionable cynicism that people only work for money. On the other hand, when I ask them about the people who shaped them -- their favorite teachers, the leaders in their community, their own parents -- they admit that those people work for a deeper reason. If they hit the lottery tomorrow, they wouldn't quit. Some work is, of course, a pretty bad job. But Centre College, and places like it, train people for work that they will find intrinsically rewarding.

As we tell them all the time, a liberal arts education is not to get you a job, but to make you into a better person. And one of the things that persons of good character do is work, work for the common good as well as to support their families, work for intrinsic reasons.

Bringing together these two contradictory views about work led to several "ah-ha" moments in class.

Library Porn

Wired has a story, with wonderful pictures, of tech entrepreneur Jay Walker's amazing library of creative class icons. My daughter sent me the link with the caption "Knowledge class style. Or, library porn. DROOL."

Amen.

Slacker Uprising

Michael Moore's new film, "Slacker Uprising," chronicles the sixty-some college rallies he held in the last couple of months before the 2004 election. He was particularly aiming at getting people who had failed to vote in the past to get off the couch and vote. He wanted them to vote for Kerry and against Bush, but mostly he called on them to vote. The film is a low-budget effort, available for download. It is a decent essay of a film.

The most fun part are the incentives that Moore offers to slackers. At the massive campus rallies he asks everyone who could have voted in the previous election but didn't to stand. Then, if they promise to register and vote, he hands them "slacker necessities": a package of Ramen noodles and a pair of clean underpants. I thought it was pretty funny. The Michigan Republic Party, alas, did not, and charged Moore with bribing voters. They lost.

The best part of Michael Moore's approach is his sincere desire to get people, especially young people, to think it is their job to participate in politics. Whatever you think of the content of his other films, these rallies are pure Americana, and a noble task. At several stops local conservatives try to bribe the student organizers or college administration to rescind the invitation. The students resist this pressure. In the one case Moore reports in which the administration caved in, the publicity from their timidity was so great that the 1000 students they expected at Cal State San Marcos turned into 10,000 when the students moved the event to the county fair grounds.

There is quite a bit of anti-Bush snark, especially from some of the guests. At heart, though, the message of civil participation was noble. And of all people, slackers need to hear that message.

To Save Your Marriage, Look for the "Marriage Friendly" Label

A study by Central Florida sociologist James Wright found that getting marital counseling from the average marriage counselor raised the chances for divorce by two or three times. What they have become, Wright says, is divorce counselors.

In response, marriage counselors who want to actually save marriages have created the National Registry of Marriage Friendly Therapists. Created by Bill Doherty (U. of Minnesota) and Kathleen Wenger (Pepperdine), the registry sorts out a problem that most people would never suspect "marriage counselors" to have -- most are therapeutically neutral on the institution of marriage.

Half of Welsh Babies Are Illegitimate

More than half of the babies born in Wales this year will be to unmarried parents. The same is true in the north part of England. Britain as a whole is likely to pass the 50% threshold within a decade if present trends continue.

In the U.S. we worry because more than a third of all births are to unmarried parents. To see that the illegitimacy rate in the Mother Country is much worse, and about to pass a tipping point, is, in a way, comforting.

I think the crucial difference between Britain and U.S. that affects birth rates is that we are a much more religious people. While it is certainly true that religiosity does not grant any family immunity from out-of-wedlock births, it does make marriage before babies more likely. How much more likely? Looking at these figures, about a fifth more likely.

Sex-Change-and-Salaries Study Doesn't Quite Make Its Case

An ingenious study by Kristen Schilt of the University of Chicago and Matthew Wiswall of New York University looked at whether men's and women's salaries changed after they had a sex change. The new men earned slightly more, and the new women quite a bit less, than they had in their previous gender. Schilt and Wiswall take this as unambiguous evidence of gender discrimination. Their crucial claim is that "while transgender people have the same human capital after their transitions, their workplace experiences often change radically."

We usually measure human capital only by level of education. For these subjects, that stayed the same. However, a more biological line of research about men's and women's differences at work emphasizes that testosterone is correlated with more aggressive work, including the desire to be paid more as a measure of status. Sex-change therapy includes significant hormone infusions, which are kept up after the surgery, to change the way the new men and women behave, as well as the way they look.

We can't tell from this study what hormonal difference there was between the new women and the men they were -- the main direction of wage change. We know at least enough to ask, though, whether in behavior that affects work the subjects of this study really were the same before and after.

Amethyst Initiative vs. Choose Responsibility

I support Choose Responsibility, a national movement to create drinking licenses for 18, 19, and 20 year olds. It was the brainchild of John McCardell, President Emeritus of Middlebury College. Last year McCardell was invited to speak to the group of liberal arts college presidents that includes Middlebury about the CR idea. What came of this discussion was the Amethyst Initiative, a call by some 130 college presidents to rethink the drinking age. CR promotes the Amethyst idea.

The news stories about the Amethyst Initiative have said it calls to end the 21 drinking age, shifting back to 18, as many states used to do. This requires federal action, because Congress tied every state's highway funds to setting the drinking age to 21.

I think it would be a bad idea to simply reduce the drinking age. I expect that McCardell saw the Amethyst idea as "half a loaf," a way to get his peer presidents to at least talk about the idea publicly. I worry, though, that a half-hearted and sluggish effort to simply reduce the drinking age, without getting something in return, will doom the drinking license idea.

The 21 drinking age has failed spectacularly and relentlessly. This is true on college campuses and off. Alcohol has always been part of human society since it was first discovered, and always will be. Our best shot at civilizing alcohol is to have the adults teach the kids how to drink in moderation. Hence, drinking licenses.

Clear away the Amethyst Initiative. On with the real debate.

"Religulous" Misses Its Own Point

Bill Maher's "Religulous" is exactly the anti-religion rant that it appears to be. He interviews religious people to make them look ridiculous. He takes sensible, caring, mainstream parts of a faith and mixes it indiscriminately with the extremist parts. He evangelizes for his own faith, secular rationalism; then, when challenged, retreats to the claim that "I'm just asking questions." "Religulous" is the film equivalent of Richard Dawkins' or Sam Harris' anti-religious books of the moment.

Maher tells us that his own religious education ended at about 13. His Jewish mother did not attempt to educate her children in her faith, and his Catholic father raised his two children as Catholics until he had a falling out with the church over birth control in young Bill's early adolescence. Maher's strong anti-religious zeal now is a relatively new development, as he was a wishy-washy "recovering Catholic" for decades. Recently, though, he has turned to a faith in rationalism beloved of many adolescent boys, myself included at that age. It is the faith that the vast majority of people on earth on ignorant, superstitious fools, and the world would be a better place if everyone were rational like me.

Yet early in the film Maher makes a different, better point. In a "gotcha" visit to the Trucker's Chapel at a truck stop in North Carolina, Maher admits that his faith is a luxury of the rich. He allows that if, for example, a man in prison said "I've got nothing in here except Jesus," Maher could respect that view. But people who are as favored as Bill Maher -- rich, famous, smart -- have the luxury of rejecting God and religion.

I believe that Bill Maher hit the nail on the head right there, as he sometimes does. He just failed to be as critical of himself as he is of everyone else through the rest of the film.